Thorough Pictures of the Heart

Abstract

You can hardly think what a pleasure it is to me to have such thorough pictures of your heart.-Jane Austen to Fanny Knight (20 February 1817)ONCE UPON A TIME A TOTAL STRANGER WROTE TO ME. I HAD HAD TWO OR THREE articles published in a Melbourne newspaper and one on the subject of migration appealed to her, for she was an englishwoman living in Australia. i was an Australian living in Greece. she did not have my address, nor did she expect the newspaper to forward her letter. instead, she used her powers of deduction, which proved to be considerable, made a shrewd guess at my location, and sent the pale blue aerogramme into the rather darker wide blue yonder. Hellenic post rose to the challenge as well, and so the letter eventually reached me.My correspondent in far-off Australia was surprised to hear that her letter had arrived, that the mission, so to speak, had been accomplished:Your letter arrived, which means my letter arrived. I can't believe it. As I pulled it out of the letterbox the wattle spilled pollen and blossom on to it, and I felt on the threshold of two worlds for a moment . . .I answered again, as was only polite; she replied, and the correspondence has now been going on for more than thirty years. this, then, was how Lesley and i came to meet. on paper-it would be five years before we met face-to-face.In this moment of writing i am also looking at two pictures propped on my desk, my eyes flicking between them and my computer screen. they were painted by artists who were interested, among other subjects, in the gentle art of correspondence, which was, at the time they were working, very much alive; these male artists liked to depict women either writing, receiving, or reading letters. the pictures i mention are separated in time by more than two centuries and were painted in very different places, but both are of women reading letters. the more recent one, the picture painted in Australia, is a 1908 work, The Letter, by e. phillips Fox. it shows a young, auburn-haired woman resting her right hand on a pink cheek; her left hand holds a letter that has been folded in the middle. she is standing in profile against a filmy curtain, and her dress is also filmy, with lace at its neck and on the ruffles edging the sleeve that has slipped down her right arm. Both dress and curtain are white, merging into grey; a darker grey seems to be the color of the flounces on the dress. the dress has a cream satin sash. the room is bathed in soft, pale light.Australia post, as it eventually became, had started almost a century before, in 1809, when ex-convict isaac nichols was given the job of boarding ships, collecting the mail, and then distributing it from his home in George street, sydney. thus the pandemonium of the general public rushing newly arrived ships was avoided. By 1908, the general public could expect two deliveries a day in big cities, while Mail day was a day to look forward to in country areas: the gigs and jinkers would be lined up waiting outside the General store.The other picture, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, was painted by dutch master Johannes Vermeer during the period 1663-1664. dutch genre paintings of the seventeenth century were the first to depict anonymous people writing, reading, dispatching, and receiving letters. But correspondence then was a highly uncertain business: literate seamen who were on their way to and from the dutch east indies, for example, left their letters on a certain beach in Madagascar, where they knew or at least hoped that other ships would pick them up.Vermeer's woman, too, is standing in profile but is facing an unseen window and gripping her letter with both hands. there are two dark-blue chairs in the room; books lie on a desk. there is a box of pearls there, too, but they often go unnoticed. the woman is dressed in a richly heavy blue jacket and a brown-toned skirt. An orange glow suffuses this room, and a dark map hangs on the wall. …